wandering rocker4545

Success! Using a grapplinghook and a winch on the drill itself I was able to counter the upward buoyancy. Extending the winch on the drill a meters so it can grab the ocean floor as it is lowered to the bottom keeps the drill in place. Mini sub center sections to provide the ballast for sinkage and the delivery of the drill head can vary , I have made several differant boats and blimps to bring the drill to a kethane patch in Kerbins ocean for tests . These would be good interplanetary deployment vehicles as well . Each vehical has the capacity to refine and hold a decent amount of kethane . That in combination with a kethane transport vessel is my system . Now that this is complete I will post pictures to help out others with this challenge . This was all Jeb's idea by the way .

Had some luck with a different design, The only part I used from "Boat parts R4" i used on this one was the mini sub ballast tanks. 2ov of them for my underwater drill attacked to the second smallest kethane tank with the small drills attached to the tank . The boat was a combination of FireSpitter parts and stock parts . And no catastrophic failures ! Got the drill to sink by even with a full ballast of water the drill popped back up to the surface lol . But hey the boat didn't spawn below the water and destroy itself so that's a small victory in itself .

Yes and yes I've tried a kethane mining sub with the same results hard to mount parts no impossible but tricky . The system I have with a barge type ship that drops the drill head into the water seemed like it would work except for the major bug I'm experiencing . With my crafts spawning below the water when I switch crafts .the winches can be edited to have longer cables that was easy . But I just can't get past this bug maybe I will take boat parts out to see if it was a problem in mod I also thought it was the kore kraken. Either way I gotta keep trying .....arg. I want this to work so bad !

Been trying for a week now to get this system working the drill submerges. The boat works awesome but when I switch to a different craft or load the games to that craft the whole thing appears underwater and destroys itself . I've tried everything I can think of I think its a type of game bug might give up on the whole idea. But underwater kethane drilling would be so useful . Any one have tips they would be willing to share would help immensely.

I also have been working on a underwater kethane drilling assembly . Using KAS and the latest Boat parts mod for.23 . Tried the kethane sub idea with loads of trouble sinking stock parts with the boat parts is hard and troublesome so I switched to a floating kethane driller that sits on the surface and lowers a ballast tank drill head with a winch made longer using th cfg files . Everything works good just have to deploy tonight . Will post pictures soon .